The death of Pete Seeger Monday at 1994 brings to an end of one of the great names in American music, a personification of folk music and the folk spirit, whose light shone on his passions and politics for more than 60 years.
I was so happy to have a chance to talk to him over the years when I was writing music at the Hartford Courant. He had a lot to say about the state since he actually made his first performance in Connecticut — at one of the two prep schools he attended there. It was sea chanteys that sparked his interest, and he got together with his school roommate, in sailor duds, to sing some songs they learned.
After five years in Litchfield, he went to school at Avon Old Farms, where he was given grants to return, he figured, because the headmasters enjoyed his newspaper.
“The Avon Weekly Newsletter,'” Seeger, Class of ’36, recalled in a 1995 interview I had with him. “I collected news for the newsletter, wrote it up, stenciled it off, collated copies and sold it for a nickel apiece.”
“Free enterprise,” said the man blacklisted as a Communist during the ’50s witch hunts.
“One year I made $90, which was a lot of money in the early ’30s. But what it really got me was a free education,” Seeger said,
Journalism — not music — was his first love. But in the depths of the Depression, “I failed utterly to get a job on a newspaper.” When he met Woody Guthrie at age 20, his life took a major turn.
Seeger has been hailed as a giant in 20th century music, the bridge between the populist union songs of the ’40s and the folk boom of the ’60s. It was his appearance at the top of a Joan Baez bill at Hartford’s Bushnell Memorial in 1962 that brought a large audience for the young singer, who previously couldn’t draw as well in Hartford.
But every time he played those days, there would be picket signs from right wingers.
Even when he was blacklisted, he said, “I went from college to college, school to school, summer camp to summer camp, playing those years. And if one particular show wasn’t a sellout, the promoter would say, ‘Gee, Pete, we should have gotten some of those John Birch Society fellers here to picket. Then we could have gotten some press.’ ”
He recalls fondly, for example, the colonel who followed his various Connecticut appearances like a die-hard fan, so he could hold up his protest sign: “Seeger: Khrushchev’s Songbird.”
“I should have given him an award,” Seeger chuckled. “He had the same sign all those years. It started to get tattered. Even after Brezhnev took over from Khrushchev.”
Seeger was scheduled to play a conference at Wesleyan University on Sept. 11, 2001, an event that had to be postponed a couple of days.
In that atmosphere following the terrorist attacks, when airlines were still grounded, Seeger, then 82, climbed to the stage carrying his battered banjo with its famous inscription, “THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS HATE AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER.”
And while his presentation stuck to the topic of music in social movements, the events of the week crept into his interpretation (or our hearing of) “Turn! Turn! Turn!” his famous adaptation of a passage of Ecclesiastes, and more people than usual were moved to singalong to “This Little Light of Mine.”
But, asked specifically, what song he would sing if he were amid the smoke of Lower Manhattan, he answered:
“A wide variety of songs. Some old Christian songs, and some old Jewish songs. The only Arabic song I know came from an engineer I knew in Beirut.”
He sang a bit of it, “Channu Ma’i,” which pairs music by Paul Matar with words by Abido Basha from a children’s play called “Abu Zahra.”
Asked which song is appropriate to sing this week, Seeger paused before he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about that.”
He finally came up with one of his most striking songs, a mixture of words by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet with the melody of the traditional ballad “Great Selchie of Shule Skerry.”
“I Come and Stand at Every Door,” as it is called, later sung by the Byrds (who did his “Turn! Turn! Turn!”) is the harrowing first-person account of a child killed at Hiroshima.
My hair was scorched by swirling flame.
My eyes grew dim; my eyes grew blind.
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind. …
All that I ask is for peace.
You fight today
So that the children of this world
May live and grow and laugh and play.